


Pastries and Puzzles

by raktajinos



Category: Nancy Drew (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, China, F/F, Female Friendship, Food, Nancy needs something to make it work!, Pseudo-Meta Puns, Puzzles, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-26 02:11:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3833131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raktajinos/pseuds/raktajinos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After 24+ hours in travelling to get to China, Nancy finds a surprise in her hotel room from her lady-spy friend. Nancy must find the right tools to 'make it work'. </p><p>Summaries are hard, yo.</p><p>(spoilers for The Silent Spy)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pastries and Puzzles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [prozacpark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/prozacpark/gifts).



> Prozacpark, I really hope you like this as I had fun writing it. Though I did risk going down the Nancy-game HOLE OF TIME SUCK in preparation for this game. 'Silent Spy' was all 'PLAY ME AGAIN'. :P
> 
> Also, thank to [this playlist](http://8tracks.com/fantastickkay/music-for-sleuths) of Nancy music that I had playing while I wrote.

She let her forehead fall against the door, sagging against it in complete exhaustion. The electronic card that would _open_ the door was drooping in her semi-outstretched hand; her mind lacking the effort to finish the task, knowing well rest lay on the other side of the wood. She sighed and finally forced herself to move, the allure of the starched sheets and soft pillows drawing her in. 

The door clicked open and she dragged her rolling suitcase in behind her, collapsing inelegantly onto the bed. Being a private detective had its perks, travelling the world on someone else’s dime was one of them...but the ten-plus hour red eye flights that were seemingly designed to mess with a person’s internal clock were not one of them. Which was how she’d found herself crawling into her hotel room in Nanchang at nine AM local time...she couldn’t remember what time her body thought it was. After a fifteen hour fight from Cape Town into Beijing, then a trip on every known transportation method as she crossed the Chinese provinces, including a rather gorgeous rail ride through Jiangxi that she regrets being too exhausted to appreciate.

Groaning, she began to stir, knowing she needed to clean herself up a bit before her day started, hoping to catch a few hours sleep before she had to meet the curator of the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute. She was brought here by the Institute in correlation with the UN and the Chinese government to assist with an investigation into stolen art. There had been some issues with her nationality, but her recent work for both private and governments all over the world ensured she had references who said she was the best for the job. Nancy couldn’t be bought or bribed and she _always_ got her man, so she was hired for the position. Which she was really excited about; she’d been wanting to come to China for years and now she got to be here _and_ solve an art crime. The best of both worlds. Too bad she was too exhausted to enjoy it. 

Nancy caught something out of the corner of her eye, turning to look at it she saw it was a unremarkable cardboard box; her curiosity peaked. She approached hesitantly, experience telling her anything could be in that box - from leftover cleaning products the hotel staff forgot to a bomb set to kill her; she’d been attacked enough over the years that she naturally began to lean towards the latter. 

Without touching it, she looked around the box, nothing like stray wires or liquid leaking out of it. She closed her eyes, listening for any mysterious ticking sounds...nothing. She focused then on scents, smelling for anything nefarious. And there, barely detectable was something sweet in the air. She pressed closer to the box, still not touching, the subtle smell ever so stronger now. 

Pausing, she let her eyes roam over the sides of the box, looking at every line and crease. And there, in the corner of the right side, literally the hardest place to see without moving the box, was a tiny drawing of a smirking snail. 

Nancy grinned, understanding clicking in, and she opened the box, lifting up the folds to reveal the contents. The source of the sweet smell was the first thing her eyes settled on, a pink box, with the name _Magrite’s_ emblazoned in gold across the top, took up one half of the box. Nancy actually moaned out loud; Magrite’s was one of her favourite places in the world, a small patisserie in Paris that made pastries to die for. She’d eaten her weight in eclairs the month she lived there. And here, in her tiny Chinese hotel room was a box of impressive-looking breakfast pastries. Her mouth salivated at the look of the glistening icing sugar, jams, and fruit lathered over the delicate butter pastries. Unashamed, she opened the box and grabbed the first pastry on top, acting _most_ unladylike and shoving half the thing in her mouth like she hadn’t seen food for days, the familiar flavours taking her momentarily back to France. 

Chomping down on the deliciousness, she focused on what else was in the box. Pulling out a thermos, she unscrewed the lid and the aroma of perfect Egyptian coffee waffed into the air. Nancy would have moaned aloud again had her mouth not been full of pastry. She closed the thermos and moved on to the other items in the box; a standard white envelope and an odd wooden sphere the size of a baseball. 

She sat down at the small table, spreading the contents out around her, reaching for another pastry before pathetically trying to open the letter with her one non-sticky hand. She chuckled at the retro 'SWAK' that was written on the back of the envelope, ripping it in half. 

_  
"Nancy,"_

_"Tell me, how long did you study this box before you opened it? If it was anything less than ten minutes I may have to re-evaluate our affiliation."_

__

The familiarity of the handwriting brought a smile to her face; as did her knowledge that she had indeed passed Zoe’s requisite time test. 

_  
"I also assume you checked for poisons."_

__

Crap. Nancy recoiled at that; she’d been too eager to dig into the pastries, too assured of the box’s sender to even consider doing what she’d been trained to do. It would be a cold day in hell before she ever admitted that to Zoe however. 

_  
"I hope this package finds you well, I think I have a real stumper for you this time. I expect grovelling and worship when you inevitable come to be begging for a clue. Don’t worry mon petite soleil, J’ai foi en vos compétences...and you do have many.”_

__

She finished it off with a dramatically large calligraphic ‘Z’ that made Nancy chuckle.  
After a long time travelling, it was exactly what she needed. A box of snacks from around the world. Nancy wondered how Zoe had managed to get some of her favourite foods from around the world, at once, into her tiny hotel room in the middle of China. But really, she shouldn't have been surprised. 

After meeting a few years ago on a case, Zoe (or Sam as she was going by then) had threatened that they'd either become friends or enemies...and Nancy was glad it was the former; she was already starting to accumulate a list of enemies and she wasn't too keen on adding a trained spy assassin to it. 

They'd started exchanging letters shortly after, with Zoe reaching out to Nancy for help with a puzzle. _She_ had said it was simply a brain exercise to keep Nancy sharp, but Nancy had suspected that it was actually case related. But that's how it started, and soon they began swapping legitimate brain puzzles. Over the years, Nancy had amassed an embarrassing amount of knowledge about and _actual_ puzzles that she knew she had the upper hand. But not for very long, as sooner or later a new puzzle would find its way to Nancy, regardless of where she happened to be. Sometimes it was email, sometimes and physical package, always a letter and puzzle within. 

Zoe was better at managing to find Nancy whenever she happened to be out on a case; it wasn't like she instagramed everything, she was discrete. But Zoe always knew, sometimes popping up for a surprise cryptic visit. Nancy tried to remember that Zoe worked for an international spy agency with unlimited funds and resources, so locating one woman wasn't something Nancy should be so easily impressed with. But she was; it wasn't just that Zoe could find her, but that she'd leave her gifts - food like now, challenging puzzles, a book she'd just read, or cool spy gadgets. One time she'd left Nancy a gun (to her horror), but she ended up being grateful to have it. 

"If you ever want to get out of the PI business and do something really exciting, just give me the word and I'll make it happen," Zoe had told her. She'd teased Nancy often enough about joining her, about going pro, but that day, after needing the gun - her first time shooting someone, it was the first time she thought seriously about Zoe's offer. To go pro. To get to use the heavy artillery...to get answers to the Big Questions, to solve Big mysteries, to travel the world with Zoe...well it was a tempting offer. And maybe one day, but she'd decided then to stay a simple civilian for a little while longer. Once you open /that: door, there's no closing it. 

Nancy turned her attention to the wooden ball, the last item in the box. It was a puzzle, that much was clear. There were no instructions for it, no hint of how it worked. She rolled it around in her palms, the wood soft from years of similar handling. She couldn't tell how old it was, at least sixty, judging from the 'used', discoloured look it had and some of the denting in the wood grain. It was beautiful still, carvings covering the ball to make it look like some sort of alien design. Nancy vaguely wondered who it belonged to, which culture or artist could claim ownership of it. She followed the carved grooves with her fingers, feeling for any sort of knick or oddity that would indicate how to open it. Because she was sure it opened; it's weight balance was slightly off and there was a muted rattling sound when she shook it. There was something inside, just how to get it out. All thoughts of sleep and exhaustion pushed from her mind. 

After about twenty minutes, Nancy was sure that to open it you just had to put your fingers in the right places around the ball and push with synchronization motion for the ball to pop open. But she was sorely mistaken if she thought she could guess the combination; hey she'd gotten lucky before. She needed to take a more manual approach; study the carvings and see if they told her anything. 

Nancy sighed, standing up to cross the room - her muscles protesting the movement - as she got a pencil and notepad from her luggage. She paused to take some sips of coffee and gracelessly shove another pastry in her mouth. Perfection; licking the remaining icing off her fingers. 

She ripped out some paper pages from her notebook, pushing one flush against the ball, adjusting it several times until she got the positioning just right. She took her pencil and started rubbing the graphite on the paper, pressing so the detail of the ball came through contrasting light with dark. It took a few minutes of doing this, rotating the ball and the paper until she got a complete etching. 

Nancy ‘hmmd’ to herself, trying to flatten the papers out and organize them on the table into a discernible pattern. She started by attempting to match up the symbols which seemed to be halved, trying to find their other halves. With no such luck. Then she attempted to use the long winding “paths” as she called them, to create a map. Again, no such like and her “map” looked more like she’d let wet ink run amuk the table. For the next twenty minutes she tried everything she could think of, twisting the papers, pushing randomly on the sphere itself fruitlessly. For once she was glad she didn’t have a time limit where at the end she’d die of gas poisoning. There were only so many times a gal could hit the reset button before her time ran out. 

Frustrated, she got up and walked around the room, grabbing another pastry as she went. Sometimes she hated puzzles; she loved them, but god did she hate them sometimes; she wasn't Hermione Granger! If she didn’t have the adrenaline of near-death pushing her forward, the puzzles could feel monotonous. Okay, that was a lie. She loved puzzles. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t look so forward to Zoe’s letters, each one containing a new _thing_ for her to focus on. Well...okay, not the _only_ reason she looked forward to her letters. 

Nancy shook herself, telling herself to focus, shaking off the feeling of exhaustion that had crept back into her body while she’d taken a break. She looked back and forth between the wooden sphere and the paper etching she made. Something wasn’t right. 

And then it clicked. 

She rushed to her bag and pulled out her sewing kit (again, one of the things she never liked to travel without; it was really too bad that customs refused to let her carry a crowbar in her luggage) and some tape. She grabbed the pieces of paper and attempted to shape them back into a ball; she’d been thinking about it all wrong. She _assumed_ that the spherical shape was meant to distract people from realizing the clue to opening it was in a linear pattern, so she’d immediately gone to mapping out the design linearly. She should have figured it out sooner than this that the sphere was meant to be read in three-dimensions. That the key was the shape itself. 

The sphere was covered in bits and pieces of the Chinese alphabet; both complete and incomplete letterings. She’d tried to piece them together, but there were so many dialects in China that it was impossible to know them all; her Mandarin was decent enough to get around, but she’d bought a book on the dialects of Jiangxi for her job here. 

She went back to Zoe’s letter, knowing there had to be a hint in there somewhere. Nancy had sent Zoe a word riddle written in 13th century Germanic knowing full well the spy didn’t have a lick of understanding for the language. They couldn’t cheat, but Nancy wasn’t above giving her a well disguised hint in the letter she sent with it. Knowing Zoe, she would do the same. 

Nancy poured over the note, looking at every single word for possible double-meaning. 

_“Don’t worry mon petite soleil, J’ai foi en vos compétences...and you do have many.”_

Nancy did the translation aloud, focusing on the words and not just automatically reading them. 

_‘my little sunshine, I have faith in your skills’._

‘My little sunshine’? Zoe had never, ever called her that, but she’d had a cycling set of pet names she used for Nancy, always “trying to find just the right one” so Nancy didn’t pay it any attention. That was her mistake..and that was her clue. ‘Sunshine’ or ‘sun’, given the shape of the puzzle the clue felt quite obvious. 

She went for her translation book and dictionaries, writing down every Chinese-character symbol for the word ‘sun’ she could find. She made a list of over thirty-five symbols, then she started going over the carved symbols on the sphere, slowly building the letter fragments to make whole symbols. Ever so slowly, she began to eliminate possibilities until she was down to one. After pinpointing all the half-characters on the sphere, she set to deciding an order. The choice of the word ‘sun’ wasn’t by accident, so she surmised that there must be an east-west ordering system for pushing the character fragments. But how to decide what was North; the ball could be rolled in any direction, which made guessing a fools game. 

A light clicked on in her brain and she irritatingly unwrapped her paper ball once more, flattening it and looking for the shapes she’d noticed earlier. 

There. 

She folded the paper back up, careful to fold the edges so the pointed lines of the compass met on her reassembly. She looked between the paper ball and the wooden one, the compass nowhere to be seen on the latter. She’d love to sit there and figure out how that particular element worked, but she was too eager to look inside. That would be for later. 

Using the compass to orient herself and the ball, she began to press her fingers against the symbols on the sphere, moving east to west, to create the symbol 日, Wu for ‘sun’. When all the symbols were pressed, she held the ball….and click. It opened. 

Elation and pride filled Nancy, and she grinned to herself. Another mystery solved. She moved the wooden pieces aside to get at the contents. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but there in the middle was a small piece of white plastic. She recognized it immediately as a key to the hotel she was staying at. 

Excitedly she bounded towards the door, slowing herself as she realized she should be cool and stealth about it. She moved into the hallway, shutting her own door behind her without a sound. The hallway was abandoned, but she felt like she was being watched. Nancy held the electronic key in her hand; she was sure there was a clue in the box as to which room Zoe was in, probably something to do with the number of pastries multiplied by the millilitres of coffee divided by the mean-size of the box itself...but Nancy was eager to see her and just decided to guess. Plus, she knew Zoe and the woman would want to be as close to the action as possible, to ensure she truly irritated Nancy, to make her put in all that work for a reward which was … so close. 

So Nancy took the two steps to the door adjacent to her room and slid the key into the lock, her heart stopping for the split second it took the lock to decide whether the key was right. 

Green light. 

Nancy pushed the door open, to see Zoe sitting on the bed, the mirror image of her own in the opposite room. 

“Gosh, took you long enough. I was about ____”, she said, her words biting but the shy smile on her face betraying her true thoughts. 

“Well, I have been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, a little slack would be nice,” Nancy replied. 

“Never!” she cried out, dramatically raising a fist in the air like a heroine out of a 40’s movie. 

“It’s nice to see you,” Nancy said, smiling, sitting down on the bed. 

“You as well, been a while,” 

“Mhmm.” A comfortable silence passed between them for a moment. 

“Thanks for the pastries, they’re delicious,”

“I remember how much you like them,” she said with a wink, “got any left?” 

“Oh! Ya a few, I’ll go get them,” she said, quickly popping back to her room to grab the box of pastries and the thermos of coffee.

“Thank god, I’ve been here forever waiting for you, starving,” Zoe said, reaching for a raspberry eclair when Nancy returned, placing the box gently on the bed as she sat back down. 

“I did wonder how you managed to get them here. And fresh too,” Nancy said, nibbling on what must have been her seventh for the morning. 

Zoe grinned, “What can I say, I’m a woman of mystery….” 

Nancy grinned back, that she was. 

“It’s lovely to see you, but why are you here?” Nancy asked after a while. 

Zoe reached for the coffee, “the job you’ve been brought out here for, well it … overlaps with one of our missions,” 

“Cathedral is _here_ ,” Nancy said skeptically, “in Jingdezhen?”

Zoe gave her usual mysterious ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ shrug. “I’m not at liberty to say,”

Nancy rolled her eyes, “then what?”

“There’s a man at the Ceramic Institute that is a...friend...of mine and I would appreciate you not putting his cover at risk,” Zoe said. 

“So you can’t tell me anything, yet there’s a Cathedral agent working at the Institute I’ve just been hired to investigate art theft for?” 

“Maybe,” Zoe said cryptic again. 

“And naturally you won’t tell me his name or what he looks like. Helpful. Thanks,” Nancy said, harshness in her voice. She’d had this issue before, sort of, Cathedral having interest in a case she was working on, trying to “work with her” but keep her deliberately in the dark and putting others at risk as a result. It was frustrating, and that showed on her face. 

“Well maybe if you finally joined us, then I could tell you stuff,” Zoe snapped at her. 

Zoe had been jokingly teasing her to join Cathedral for years, but she’d only made a serious offer once or twice. It was in Nancy’s court, whether she decided to join or not, the offer still stood. 

Instead of angering, Nancy deflated. Zoe was right. It would be nice for Zoe to talk freely of her work, of her life, of the stuff she did day-to-day, instead of cryptic non-answers and conversations solely about books and what they’d just marathoned on Netflix. 

“Zoe, you know why I can’t,” she said quietly. 

Zoe shuffled down the bed to sit next to Nancy, touching her arm. “I know, I know,” she said, “but I think she’d be proud of you regardless of what you did.”  
She was afraid. Her mom died because of Cathedral, how could she sign up to do the same work knowing that. What would her mom think? Surely she didn’t want the same life and fate for her daughter. How could she? 

“What do _you_ want to do?” Zoe asked. 

“Solve crime and travel the world,” Nancy replied automatically. 

“Well, I don’t think the Avengers are recruiting right now, but you know the offer stands. I won’t force you, but Cathedral can give you that...plus it has a great benefit plan,”

“Dental coverage would be nice,” Nancy said, slightly teasing, slightly not. Dental work was expensive. 

“Plus, we get an excellent clothing stipend every month,” Zoe said, running her hands over Nancy’s definitely not fashionable track suit, she’d worn it for travel purposes, it wasn’t supposed to be fashionable. 

Nancy laughed. “Seriously?” 

“Ya. Oh my god, don’t tell me _that_ is what might convince you,” Zoe said. 

“Hey, maintaining this retro look is hard work,” 

Zoe placed a gentle kiss on Nancy’s neck, “but you do it so well,” 

Nancy turned her head, leaning to kiss Zoe properly, tasting the coffee on her lips. She placed one of her hand on her thigh and moved it upwards, teasing the fabric of her dress out of the way. The kiss ignited and Nancy truly forgot she was supposed to be tired, pushing Zoe down on the bed and straddling her. 

“You sure you can’t tell me anything more about this contact?” Nancy said as she focused on the buttons of Zoe’s dress. 

“Are you trying to seduce information out of me?” Zoe said, going for Nancy’s horrible track sweater. 

“No,” Nancy grinned, “but we both know I could if I wanted to,”

“Oh, my _one_ weakness,” Zoe said dramatically, hand resting against her forehead in mock damselness. 

“I know about more than one,” Nancy said, both a threat and a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea if that puzzle ball would even work, I just made it up as I went :P. I also didn't know where this story was going to go. You said in your letter that you shipped Nancy/Zoe, but I wasn't sure if I could make that work (not from a non-shipping perspective, but just *how* to make it feel in character), so I started writing as if I was doing a platonic-flirty thing and then the ship just emerged, which I was pleased about. I'm a multishipping whore, so now I have a new ship! YAY!!
> 
> Also, apologies if I got any Chinese history/culture/language stuff wrong. Please tell me and I will correct.


End file.
